During the first three decades of the twentieth century, eugenics, the scientific control of human mating, was a favorite trigger within enlightened and progressive sections of the English-speaking world. The New York Situations eagerly supported it, gushing about the beautiful “new science.” Prominent researchers, like the flower biologist Luther Burbank, had been among its most enthusiastic supporters. As well as the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations generously funded eugenic analysis intended to differentiate the “match” through the “unfit.”This prophetic volume counters the intellectual nihilism of Nietzsche, while simultaneously rebuking European notions of progress-biological or elsewhere. Chesterton expands his criticism of eugenics into what he phone calls “a more general criticism of the present day craze for scientific officialism and rigid social firm.”